Timed tool checks

[bryan.davis]

Weve just taken delivery of a machine complete with renishaw probing.

Now, some of our toolpaths can take as much as 48 hours to run, and as you can appreciate toolwear is a major problem.

Is there a way in mastercam to automatically have a sub program call inserted at timed intervals (calculated by the cutter path) whic will allow us to perform an automatic tool inspection and tool change where appropriate?

[limitless creativity]

You should see if the machine came with tool life management. Meaning you can set it to the time in the cut before changing tools or the number of times the tool comes out. If you spent the money on a probe then the money spent on tool life management is worth it. Some Mfg will offer it in the machine package others call it an option.

Mike P.

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

I'm with Mike on this one. Tool life management is the way to go. There are two types. One counts cycles the tool has run, and the second counts the minutes/hours. Get the type that counts time. It handles what you want. Much easier than dealing with it in the post and much more reliable.

JMHO

[bryan.davis]

tool life management only works on tool changes where it will interrogate the tools past useage statistics and decide upon a sister tool or not based upop figures decerned from predicted tool life.

However, if you have a single tool path that lasts some 48 hours and a predicted tool life of 4 hours then you need to manually write 12 separate program segments each approximately 4 hours long.

BUT, what I would like is to be able to create a 48 hour tool path, tell mastercam that I have an expected tool life of 4 hours and have MasterCAM produce the 12 segments automatically, a trick that would reduce a 4 hour job down to half an hour!

[Turf Toes]

Bryan,

I use Tool Life Management on my Fidia with some degree of success. What I had to do was modify my post so that I had a integrity check of the tool every 1000 lines of code, I just started at that point, can be any number of lines. The only problem I have with this method is that if the tool has broken down between these checks, the machine calls up another tool in the family, but begins from the current check, instead of backing up to the last known good check. This is all performed with a laser BTW.

[cam-eleon]

I have once wrote a macro that checked for the remaining tool life at every Z retract. It was one line of code, all the internal calculation was done by the macro. It would call up spare "sister" tools that were loaded into the machine and continue it's way along after a tool change and re-starting the spindle etc. In my case the post was able to output a safe start block after each retract as well as call the macro. You could have the macro do this by recalling current speed, feed, coolant conditions, spindle direction etc.

This is all dependant on your machine capabilities.

[Toby]

Bryan,

what your requesting then has nothing to do with probing but rather that M/C determines where it's at in four hours of running then automatically change tools and continue where it left off? Is it possible to put this tool into subs without hours of editing?

[Allan Brown]

I'll chime in on a post-based solution.

The Mill.set post-based setup sheet offers a time calculation so cycle time estimates. For Mastercam to generate a post-based cycle time estimate, the timing postblocks from Mill.set can be inserted into a post. This takes quite a bit of time and effore, but has been done before. In the extreme case, you can essentially smash Mill.set and Mpfan.pst together to generate the setup sheet and the NC file in the same post run.

In theory, you could add a logic line within the timing postblocks to check the accumulated time, and to call a pstop type postblock (currently being discussed in another thread on the Forum) when 4 hours is reached. The pstop postblock could retract and call your custom inspection and possible toolchange subprogram. You'd also need to reset to tool time counter at this point.

So, it's 'do-able' within Mastercam in the hands of post processor Royalty. You should expect to pay for a day or two of post services for this one.